Friday Rambles and Game Dev Update 2024-08-23

It's the Friday Rambles.

Life Stuff

Not much to say here, it's pretty much the same routine. My Apple Watch annoyingly didn't pick up some exercise or stand minutes or whatever and broke my months-long streak so now I stopped caring about Apple Watch rings.

I saw some news about a brand of sous vide machines suddenly requiring a monthly subscription to use all its features. All I can say is, an air fryer will never require a monthly subscription to use.

Above: Everyone's the air frying type, whether they know it yet or not

Merch Stuff

Some activity here on my part, mostly making TGS swag for people who visit my booth. I'm making clearfiles! I buy clearfiles all the time, they're popular in Japan, and they look really cool with Endless Monday art, so I had a bunch made to give away. I also ordered some stickers featuring new art from the new chapter. Will be giving those away too. So much merch to give away. Please visit my booth.

Above: Example of the Fangamer Va11halla clearfiles that I couldn't resist buying when visiting the Fangamer shop in Shibuya

Above: The new "key art" or whatever I drew for the 1 year anniversary putting in lots of work. Will be featured on the clearfiles I'll be giving away at TGS

No new drops or anything for a while on my shop, though, so that's been a big ol' hole in my budgeting spreadsheet this month. C'est la vie.

Gamedev Stuff

It was a productive week. Well, if it weren't I'd be screwed for TGS, which was pretty good motivation to be honest.

I played through the demo after my last post and I felt it needed a lot of revision before I'd be happy with showing it to people. So I quickly tore out a bunch of stuff, added a bunch of new stuff, and now I'm really happy with it. And it unlocked a new path forward for some narrative stuff I was stuck with in the middle of the chapter. Very cool and very motivating.

I finalized the demo script on Monday, and translation is already almost done - a few lines left and needs proofreading and revision, but is still on track to be ready for the deadline of "first week of September" (pending the number of revisions needed). Whew! Of course, the full version script has since evolved a lot, because I wrote a bunch more and changed around a bunch of stuff (again), but not enough to have to redo the demo script or anything. But, anyway, it's really really coalescing into its final form now.

Above: Still too quiet. Still kinda creepy.

I drew two of the illustrations Penny needs to draw for her project. They turned out much better than I was expecting. I'm not going to post them here because they're spoilers, but I'm pretty excited. The problem with Penny being canonically good at drawing is that I also have to be good at drawing to draw Penny's art, and I was worried that I wouldn't be able to pull it off. Well, it remains to be seen if I actually did... (well, I think it's good enough)

Similarly to the original game, she'll need to draw six of them. But this time, there's a twist...

Anyway, now that two are done, I just need to draw four more. Easy! Right...?

Above: Oh... no... Am I Penny...?

Well, I can save those for after I finish the demo build. The demo build only has one illustration you can achieve as an objective.

Above: Tiger-chan not being helpful... But of course she's very helpful IRL

This chapter has a lot more one-off artwork and CGs than the original game. I've been churning them out pretty quickly. I think my experience with frantically drawing dozens of comic panels for two plushie campaigns since the initial release of the game has really leveled me up in terms of both speed and quality.

So what remains for demo build (Deadline: at most 2 weeks from now):

• Finishing three remaining CGs

• Finishing up JP localization and LQA, sprite/asset localization

• Attract mode, for when a demo station is idle (basically an auto-play of the game through various scenes, like in the trailer)

  • A side effect of this is I can repurpose it to add an auto-advance feature to the game, too. Like they have in most other VNs.

• Configuration panel for timer/other demo kiosk options

• Bugfixes

Simultaneously I'm still doing more writing for the full version of the script, to put off doing demo build work. So it goes. At least I'm still productive.

The End

Not a lot of very fun screenshots this week or anything, but I do want some stuff to be a surprise, after all. Anyway, thanks for your support, as always! Next week I'll be finishing up the demo build stuff listed above. I wanna say developing this game is glamorous or whatever but it's mostly just a lot of mundane work. Maybe too much work for a free update... well maybe it'll be worth it for when I release the game on Switch. Okay see you next week!